The English Department at Högskolan Dalarna, Sweden, participates in a distance learning program with the Faculty of Education at Vietnam National University. Students who enroll in this program are teachers of English at secondary or tertiary institutions, and will study half-time for two years to complete a Master’s degree in English Linguistics. The distance program, adapted specifically to accommodate the Vietnamese students in terms of cultural differences as well as inexperience with distance methodology, is characterized by three design features: testing, technical training, and fostering a community of learners. The design of the courses also reflects a learner-centered approach that addresses common problem areas in distance education by promoting interactivity. Central to the overall program is the maintenance of different channels of communication, reflecting an effort to support the students academically and socially, both as individuals and members of a learning community. In this way, the effects of physical and cultural distances are minimized.

This chapter is an analysis of a 100,000-word corpus consisting of message-board postings on hip-hop websites. A discourse analysis of this corpus reveals three strategies employed by the posters to identify themselves as members of the hip-hop community in the otherwise anonymous setting of the internet: (1) defined openings and closings, (2) repeated use of slang and taboo terms, and (3) performance of verbal art. Each strategy is characterized by the codification of non-standard grammar and pronunciations characteristic of speech, as well as by the use of non-standard orthography. The purpose of the discourse is shown to be a performance of identity, whereby language is used and recognized as the discursive construction of one’s hip-hop identity.

The methodology of the present study, designed for the purpose of collecting quantitative and qualitative data, reflects a sociolinguistic approach to swearing, allowing for an investigation of the relationship between swear word usage and social context. Swearing utterances and details of the social context in which they were made were recorded discretely and anonymously with the use of field notes within the University of Florida undergraduate student speech community. Sixty members of this speech community also participated in a six-part questionnaire which elicited information regarding use of and attitudes towards swear words. Eleven of the questionnaire participants furthermore participated in an ethnographic interview to discuss the questionnaire and the subject of swearing in greater depth.
Previous research had established swearing as both a frequently occurring speech behavior within the university speech community (Cameron, 1969; Jay, 1986; Nerbonne and Hipskind, 1972) as well as a highly offensive one (Driscoll, 1981; Jay, 1977, 1978, 1986; Mabry, 1975; Manning and Melchiori, 1974). The resulting ‘swearing paradox’ represents the question of how frequency and offensiveness can be directly related. The results of the present study explicate the swearing paradox by providing evidence of a discrepancy between the type of swearing that is most characteristic of social interaction within the university speech community and the type of swearing which is typically presented in offensiveness ratings tasks.
The use of swear words in conversational American English was revealed to be a linguistic device used to affirm in-group membership and establish boundaries and social norms for language use. Intraspeaker and interspeaker variation in the use of and attitudes towards swear words was shown to be primarily a function of interlocutor gender and race. The data show evidence of males imposing standards of language use on females and suggest that different races use swear words to fulfil different social functions. Finally, the data suggest that the members of the focus speech community impose restrictions and standards on the swearing behavior of out-group members.

The methodology of the present study, designed for the purpose of collecting quantitative and qualitative data, reflects a sociolinguistic approach to swearing, allowing for an investigation of the relationship between swear word usage and social context. Previous research had established swearing as both a frequently occurring speech behavior within the university speech community and a highly offensive one. The resulting ‘swearing paradox’ represents the question of how frequency and offensiveness can be directly related. The results of the present study explicate the swearing paradox by providing evidence of a discrepancy between the type of swearing that is most characteristic of social interaction within the university speech community and the type of swearing which is typically presented in offensiveness ratings tasks.

It is well established that contraction, like many other reduced forms, occurs more
frequently in spoken than in written language (Biber 1988; Tobin 1994; Tottie 1991;
Yaeger-Dror et al. 2002). Nevertheless, contracted forms in written texts have received
the bulk of attention in corpus studies, traditionally seen as indicators of register and
interaction type (Westergren Axelsson 1998; Biber 1988; Kjellmer 1998; Tobin 1994;
Tottie 1991; Yaeger-Dror et al. 2002). In this paper, I investigate contractions occurring
in the spoken conversation component of the BNC, first comparing occurrences of full
and contracted forms then, following Yaeger-Dror et al. (2002), specifically focussing
on competing aux- vs. not-contraction in similar contexts.
The current analysis confirms a clear preference for contracted forms over full forms in
the spoken corpus and, in so doing, sets the stage for characterizing the variation
between two contracted versions of the same full form, for example, there’s not vs.
there isn’t. Such competing aux- vs. not-contractions (Hiller’s “Janus Kontraktionen”)
in the conversation component of the corpus encourage a lexico-grammatical analysis
(cf. Tagliamonte & Smith 2002) as opposed to one strictly based on register, dialect or
interaction type. In this paper, aux- and not-contraction are shown to prefer different
grammatical and lexical environments. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered
based on collocational preferences instead.

In expert-novice exchanges, accommodation usually takes the form of 'content convergence' (Giles & Smith, 1979), where a lack of shared expertise on a particular topic may lead to the manipulation of content for the purpose of increasing comprehension and facilitating communication. Performed by the expert participant, such accommodation is based primarily on the limited knowledge of the novice. However, my data from expert-novice exchanges on the topic of sex and sexuality show content convergence to be negligible. Instead, accommodation in the form of `content management' characterized by access to or denial of information dominates. The research is based on conversations recorded at a youth center in Germany (German-language data). Five adult volunteers (four males, ages 20, 21, 24 and 39; 1 female, age 20) at the center each agreed to participate in one conversation about sex and sexuality with an inquisitive adolescent (14-year-old female or 13-year-old male) from the same youth center. Because of their social status as well as familiarity and experience with the topic, the adults represent the experts, while the adolescents freely admit to being novices. The adult experts manage the content of conversation by either accommodating the novices' desire to gain information or denying this desire through avoidance strategies. The extent of accommodation or avoidance is shown not to be a function of novice knowledge, but rather of age and gender. Experts accommodate to novices of the same gender and similar age by directly answering questions, being candid, joking and laughing. Their exchanges are further characterized by extensive topic exploration and detail. In exchanges among participants of dissimilar ages and genders, experts resort to avoidance strategies including requests for other-disclosure, hedging, opting out or making third-party references. Persistent topic exploration efforts by the novices are similarly and consistenty deflected, often resulting in conflict.

The assertion of identity and power via computer-mediated communication in the context of distance or web-based learning presents challenges to both teachers and students. When regular, face-to-face classroom interaction is replaced by online chat or group discussion forums, participants must avail themselves of new techniques and tactics for contributing to and furthering interaction, discussion, and learning. During student-only chat sessions, the absence of teacher-led, face-to-face classroom activities requires the students to assume leadership roles and responsibilities normally associated with the teacher. This situation raises the questions of who teaches and who learns; how students discursively negotiate power roles; and whether power emerges as a function of displayed expertise and knowledge or rather the use of authoritative language. This descriptive study represents an examination of a corpus of task-based discussion logs among Vietnamese students of distance learning courses in English linguistics. The data reveal recurring discourse strategies for 1) negotiating the progression of the discussion sessions, 2) asserting and questioning knowledge, and 3) assuming or delegating responsibility. Power is defined ad hoc as the ability to successfully perform these strategies. The data analysis contributes to a better understanding of how working methods and materials can be tailored to students in distance learning courses, and how such students can be empowered by being afforded opportunities and effectively encouraged to assert their knowledge and authority.

The occurrence of pauses and hesitations in spontaneous speech has been shown to occur systematically, for example, "between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions and before accented content words." (Hansson [15]) This is certainly plausible in English, where pauses and hesitations can and often do occur before content words such as nominals, for example, "uh, there's a … man." (Chafe [8]) However, if hesitations are, in fact, evidence of "deciding what to talk about next," (Chafe [8]) then the complex grammatical system of German should render this pausing position precarious, since pre-modifiers must account for the gender of the nominals they modify.
In this paper, I present data to test the hypothesis that pre-nominal hesitation patterns in German are dissimilar to those in English. Hesitations in German will be shown, in fact, to occur within noun phrase units. Nevertheless, native speakers most often succeed in supplying a nominal which conforms to the gender indicated by the determiner or pre-modifier. Corrections, or repairs, of infelicitous pre-modifiers indicate that the speaker was unable to supply a nominal of the same gender which the choice of pre-modifier had committed him/her to. The frequency of such repairs is shown to vary according to task, with fewest repairs occurring in elicited speech which allows for linguistic freedom and therefore is most like spontaneous speech. The data sets indicate that among German native speakers, hesitations occurring before noun phrase units (pre-NPU hesitations) indicate deliberation of what to say, while hesitations within or before the head of the noun phrase (pre-NPH hesitations) indicate deliberation of how to say what has already been decided (cf. Chafe [8]).

In the case of child bilingualism, much debate has been generated as to whether speech reflects one single syntactic system or two. Code-switching data from child bilinguals has served both sides of the issue. It has been suggested that code-switching, or language mixing, reflects either a) one syntactic system, with harmonious interaction between each language\'s lexical and morphosyntactic features, or b) evidence of limited ability in two separate systems (cf. De Houwer, 1990; Deuchar and Quay, 1998, 2000; Genesee, 1989; Köppe, 1997; Lanza, 1992, 1997; Lipski, 1998; Paradis and Genesee, 1996; Redlinger and Park, 1980). The controversy is fundamentally one of the have\'s versus the have-not\'s: bilingual children have either one large system at their disposal, or two small systems. Can the accuracy of either theory be determined by examining code-switching data from a child bilingual learning a second language? In this poster presentation, code-switching data is presented from an English-Swedish bilingual learning German in a second-language environment. Code-switching utterances involving the child\'s \"third language\", German, were collected over a period of 6 months (from age 2,8 to 3,4), and analyzed in terms of syntax and lexicon. Should the data have been limited to English-German and/or Swedish-German code-switching, the case for two systems would be supported. However, evidence of three-language code-switching suggests the existence of a single system, where switches to the \"third language\" reveal not limited resources in the other two languages, but rather an awareness of -as well as adventurous exploitation of- a further linguistic possibility.

In this poster presentation, I present an analysis of a 100,000 word corpus consisting of message board entries on hip-hop music and culture. This sample corpus clearly shows that the contributors write in a manner characteristic of spoken language, but that they also exploit the medium of the message board to further identify themselves linguistically in ways which are not possible in speech. This corpus thus serves to exemplify the new wave of "real language" which corpus linguistics has yet to account for. Furthermore, the analysis addresses the problem of knowing "real speakers" by considering speaker identity not as a combination of sociolinguistic variables, but as a linguistic construction of self.

1. Introduction
Much of the support that students have in a traditional classroom is absent in a distance learning course. In the traditional classroom, the learner is together with his or her classmates and the teacher; learning is socially embedded. Students can talk to each other and may learn from each other as they go through the learning process together. They also witness the teacher’s expression of the knowledge firsthand. The class participants communicate to each other not only through their words, but also through their gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice, and the teacher can observe the students’ progress and provide guidance and feedback in an as-needed basis. Further, through the habit of meeting in a regular place at a regular time, the participants reinforce their own and each other’s commitment to the course.
A distance course must somehow provide learners other kinds of supports so that the distance learner also has a sense of connection with a learning community; can benefit from interaction with peers who are going through a similar learning process; receives feedback that allows him or her to know how he or she is progressing; and is guided enough so that he or she continues to progress towards the learning objectives. This cannot be accomplished if the distance course does not simultaneously promote student autonomy, for the distance course format requires students to take greater responsibility for their own learning. This chapter presents one distance learning course that was able to address all of these goals.
The English Department at Högskolan Dalarna, Sweden, participates in a distance learning program with Vietnam National University. Students enrolled in this program study half-time for two years to complete a Master’s degree in English Linguistics. The distance courses in this program all contain two types of regular class meetings: one type is student-only seminars conducted through text chat, during which students discuss and complete assignments that prepare them for the other type of class meeting, also conducted through text chat, where the teacher is present and is the one to lead the discussion of seminar issues and assignments. The inclusion of student-only seminars in the course design allows for student independence while at the same time it encourages co-operation and solidarity. The teacher-led seminars offer the advantages of a class led by an expert.
In this chapter, we present chatlog data from Vietnamese students in one distance course in English linguistics, comparing the role of the student in both student-only and teacher-led seminars. We discuss how students navigate their participation roles, through computer-mediated communication (CMC), according to seminar type, and we consider the emerging role of the autonomous student in the foreign-language medium, distance learning environment. We close by considering aspects of effective design of distance learning courses from the perspective of a foreign language (FL) environment.

Research on swearing has traditionally focussed on swear words as single units, for example, in terms of
definition, offensiveness, syntactic roles, or semantic categories. In the present study, spontaneous swearing
utterances were recorded in naturally occurring social settings, in an attempt to observe the social conditions
conducive to swear word usage. Data collected from a university speech community suggest an important role
of swearing in the identity construction of young adults. It is hypothesized that their use of swear words
functions as an element of the discursive construction of identity of self, while the non-use of swear words can
be understood as a construction of the identity of other.
The data of over 500 swearing utterances, 60 questionnaires and 11 interviews were collected within a
university speech community. The spontaneous swearing utterances reveal clear tendencies among the subjects
to use swear words with interlocutors who are most like themselves in terms of age, race and gender. Among
the student (young adult) sample population, the use of swear words functions to identify the speaker (self) as
similar to the hearer, thus establishing or confirming group solidarity. As interlocutor similarities decrease,
however, so do the swearing utterances. For example, the data showed a decrease in swear word usage when
interlocutors were of different gender and a further decrease among interlocutors of different race. The fewest
occurrences of swearing, however, were among interlocutors of different age. In fact, the questionnaire and
interview data revealed age of the hearer to be the most influential variable in determining the speaker’s
likelihood to swear. The data indicate that, for young adults, to refrain from swearing is a way of actively
constructing (or imposing) the identity of other, thus establishing or confirming social distance. Swearing is
regarded as a proprietary linguistic marker of identity, which itself is bound to generation. Within this
student/young adult speech community, the use of swear words both with and by younger or older interlocutors
is decried as inappropriate. Generation is therefore an important variable in identity construction, as it can
award or restrict linguistic freedom.

A cornerstone of pragmatic theories of the interpretation or negotiation of meaning is the concept of common ground (Stalnaker, 1978), common knowledge (Lewis, 1969), or joint knowledge (McCarthy, 1990), which Clark (1996:92) refers to as the “sine qua non for everything we do with others.” One thing we often do with others is watch television or movies, and subsequently we secure these activities as common ground through talk. In this paper, I analyze conversations among family members whose use of quoting from the dialogue of films and television programs represents conversational strategies whereby common ground is exploited for different purposes. In particular, quoting is shown to be used by children to showcase knowledge and hold the floor, and by parents to establish alignments with other members of the family or indirectly opinionate on an on-going conversation between other family members.
The data come from recorded conversations among members of a four-person, Swedish-American family. Each family member speaks Swedish and English and uses both on a daily basis. Three members of the family also speak German and use it on a near-daily basis. The shared linguistic knowledge among the family members therefore represents an additional common ground, which enables the appropriation of media texts in different languages. The integration of quotes from film or television texts into conversation often results in code-switching and, due to the languages typically associated with the different possible familial dyads, crossing (Rampton, 1995) can be said to occur as well. The appropriation of a media text is therefore identified as an appropriation of and alignment with a linguistic identity, resulting in additional challenges to interlocutors with regards to the negotiation of meaning.

In this paper, the Internet message board forum is proposed as an example of a community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992) in which contributors exhibit common linguistic conventions and forms of participation. The emergence of individual identities in interaction is examined in the genre-specific context of hip-hop Internet message boards. A corpus analysis of message board postings clearly shows that contributors systematically exploit the spoken and written qualities of the language of message boards, the “third medium” (Crystal, 2001) to identify themselves linguistically. Linguistic conventions or practices reveal a tendency among contributors to discursively construction their identities via a “social positioning of self and other” (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) as experts or non-experts in the hip-hop community. Contributors’ identities as experts or simply in-group members are further corraborated or established by the codification not only of non-standard pronunciations and grammar characteristic of speech, but also of non-standard orthography, which demands a written forum to be appreciated, as it is neutralized and unremarkable in speech. Because of the written and spoken qualities of message board discourse, both the content and the form of postings can be manipulated to showcase familiarity with hip-hop discursive practices. Internet message boards therefore represent the ideal forum for discursively constructing a hip-hop identity.

In this chapter, I analyze computer-mediated communication in the form of online, synchronous, professional discourse in the multimodal video conference environment with the aim of assessing social co-presence (Kang et al., 2008). I argue for the applicability of discourse analysis methodology by presenting extracts of video conference communication which illustrate how talk-in-interaction contributes to or threatens the three elements of social co-presence: co-presence, social richness of the medium, and interactant satisfaction. Examples of interaction illustrate how disruptions in mediation serve to threaten co-presence by isolating interlocutors, how multiple modes of communication are exploited to ground participants in a shared communicative environment thereby establishing social connectedness, and how multimodal communication allows for iconic or paralinguistic support of the discursive expression of emotional stance. The chapter concludes with feature recommendations for video conference software development from the perspective of social co-presense.

In this workshop, we consider how the use of new media technologies in net-based education can facilitate or impair knowledge performance. Our examples come from net-based courses offered by the English Department at Högskolan Dalarna, and show different kinds of technologies and educational tools in use. The examples reflect not only the student perspective, but also a teacher perspective, in acknowledgement of the fact that teachers are also performers of knowledge and users of new media technologies. The goal of the workshop is to share experiences of both successful and unsuccessful performances of knowledge in the net-based education environment, and, by including both the student and teacher perspectives, encourage workshop participants to discuss how they and their students can more effectively interact with technology.

This chapter presents an analysis of recordings of workplace interactions conducted with videoconferencing software. Video-conferencing offers users the widest variety of channels, or modes, of interaction, combining video with voice chat, text chat, whiteboard capabilities and collaborative document manipulation. The video-conferencing environment is therefore conducive to multimodal communication, defined in this chapter as the collaborative use of any one of these modes or combination of modes within one communicative event. The standard form of multimodal communication is a combination of video, voice chat and whiteboard application. The use of other modes is shown to reflect distinct communicative functions. Communicating via multiple modes can be technologically demanding and consequently affect usability, potentially necessitating the use of meta-modal language among video-conference participants. Overtly attending to the modes of communication during online interaction is therefore shown to be part and parcel of video-conferencing, serving to initiate repairwork and facilitate the progression of communication.

The assertion of identity and power via computer-mediated communication in the context of distance or web-based learning presents challenges to both teachers and students. When regular, face-to-face classroom interaction is replaced by online chat or group discussion forums, participants must avail themselves of new techniques and tactics for contributing to and progressing interaction, discussion, and learning. During student-only chat sessions, the absence of teacher-led, face-to-face classroom activities requires the students to assume leadership roles and responsibilities normally associated with the teacher. This situation raises the questions of who teaches and who learns; how students discursively negotiate power roles; and whether power emerges as a function of displayed expertise and knowledge or rather the use of authoritative language. In this descriptive study, we examine a corpus of task-based discussion logs among students of distance learning courses in English linguistics. The data reveal recurring discourse strategies used by students for the purpose of 1) negotiating the progression of the discussion sessions, 2) asserting and questioning knowledge, and 3) assuming or relinquishing power and responsibility. The data contribute to a better understanding of how working methods and materials can be tailored to distance learning students, and how such students can be afforded opportunities or even more effectively encouraged to assert their knowledge and authority.

This paper reports the intelligibility difficulties experienced by students of English for academic purposes at a university in Sweden while taking part in synchronous net-based seminars. Connectivity limitations, microphone and headphone problems, background noise and other factors in combination with limited skill in the perception of English speech make it difficult for these students to process speech directed to them. In addition, the speech the students are trying to process may be produced by nonnative speakers of English, either fellow students or teachers. A comparison of simultaneous communication in several of the modes available in the virtual seminar environment showed that students make use of a number of strategies to partly compensate for their failure to optimally perceive and produce speech.

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term émigrés of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to which extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system on the one hand or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited by a film retelling task from German émigrés in Canada (n=52) and the Netherlands (n=50) and from Dutch émigrés in Canada (n=45) to retellings produced by predominantly monolingual control groups in Germany (n=53) and the Netherlands (n=45). Findings show that the attriting groups overuse empty pauses, repetitions and retractions, while the distribution of filled pauses appears to conform more closely to the L2 norm. An investigation of the location at which disfluency markers appear within the sentence suggests that they are indicators of difficulties which the attriters experience largely in the context of lexical retrieval.